Kaikoura - Whale Watching

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We left the lovely hostel in Christchurch for a 3 hour drive north to Kaikoura, the drive itself was pleasant, it was a Sunday morning and apart from the odd freight truck the roads were quiet.

We got to the hostel around noon and settled it, it's a real small affair, about 7 rooms I've found, really nice though, amazing views over the sea and a lovely garden with a hammock that I've already claimed as my own, loads of fruit growing too so we'll save some pennies by pinching that......

We went out for a wander through the small town and got us some supplies, we were going whale watching at 3pm so wanteed to do a 'reckie' to find the departure point, we found it no problem and took a look inside.

It had a warning up that the sea was choppy and travel travel sickness may occur, they were also awaiting confirmation that the 3pm trip would go ahead as the forecast wasn't clever.

Luckily for us it didn't materialize to much and the trip went ahead as scheduled, we were thankful it did, even though it was quite choppy the trip was amazing. It is an expensive trip, $125 each but there is an 80% refund if you don't see a whale but having paid the money to see whales then that's what we were hoping for, forget the refund.

The boat was a catamaran affair that sped around at about 35 knots, the ride was real bumby at times and it didn't take too long for the first sea-sick casualty to be taken to the medical room, Fiona was fine though, she had taken her prescibed medicine. There were around 40 people on board and everyone was eager to see, Fiona and I opted for seats at the end of two rows so we could jump out and get on to the deck if a spotting occured, we made a wise choice.

There were a couple of false alarms at first, the host informs you that the average whale spot per trip is either one or two but she'd seen a couple that morning so we were hopefull. We were looking for Sperm Whales, huge things they are but difficult to spot as we're in the middle of the ocean, about 35 mins from land going at some speed.

They don't use any sonar equipment to find the whales as it damages the whales natural sonar, it's just some dude with a beard on the roof of the boat with a pair of binoculars, captain Ron as I called him, can't remember what his real name was, Mike I think, anyway he sits up there and when he spots a whale we go hell for leather towards it.

Now a whale stays on the surface for around 10 minutes every hour or so but if you see one in the distance then he's showing himself quite a bit, in these scenarios they're getting ready to submerge again, what they're actually doing is freezing the liquid inside their head so they can dive quicker, it's amazing stuff and is how they got their name.

The Sperm Whale has loads of this floating liquid stuff surrounding it's brain, that is the size of a basketball btw, when the early whalers caught the first one they thought it was the whales seamen and thats how the Sperm Whale was named, many years later when they caught the first female they noted that she too had this liquid so it wasn't seamen but the name was already recorded so they stuck to it.

This 'stuff' has a number of uses, it is used in it's liquid form to send sonar messages at different frequencies to do anything from communicate to paralyzing it's prey, mental things I tell thee, some scientist who was studying them for a while recorded sounds at such a high frequency that it caused him to suffer internal bleeding and a punctured lung, no good like.

Anyway they can change the form of this 'stuff' at a mental quick rate, from liquid to solid and back again, they use this for submerging and coming up at rapid pace. Just as we got close to the first one, about 200m away it dived, the tale coming up is an amzing part of the whale spot but we missed it on this acocunt as we were at the wrong side of the boat.

Anyway off we popped and by the time we were 500m, not even in naked eye shot of the next whale, it had gone too, hearts sunk a bit but then we were off again, another one was spotted and he was lying low so it looked as though he'd just come up, 2 mins later and we were 50m away and watching this beast, it was amzing, the size, the features, the rainbow affect as they exhale air explosively through their blowhole, fantastic.

We managed to see another 2 after this so had a really successful trip, we loved every minute of it and it was really worthwhile, so much so in fact we've booked up to go dolphin spotting tomorrow, fingers crossed.

The photo's maybe don't do it justice but I was wary of spending too much time watching the whales through the camera lens so took some quickly then watched it myself, selfish I know but hey, what you gonna do?

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Photos

Submerge !!
A Sperm Whale goes down

Getting ready
to go down....

Nearly there
..........

The full bhuna
or as much of it as we saw, about half of the body length actually.

View from our bedroom
in Kaikoura

Fiona on the "beach"
at Kaikoura

A peach from the garden
and it was tasty, mmmn mmmn.